AsgardFM wrote:As an aside regarding FB, does it have higher than average scaling with agility, or something else? I see it crit for 900k during opening burst yet midfight it doesn't pass 400, even when it consumes maximum energy.
As has been said, feels a waste most of the time but if it reached those opening numbers more often then casting it actually feels like it was worth it.

It does, because it's a pure attack power ability rather than a weapon damage ability. So it scales as well as our bleeds with agility, and better than our other direct damage attacks. (But the tradeoff is that, like bleeds, it doesn't scale at all with the DPS of your equipped weapon.)

This will make less of a difference in Warlords of Draenor. Currently, the DPS of your equipped weapon contributes about 2/3 of the damage of a "weapon damage" ability, with attack power contributing the remaining 1/3. In Warlords, the equipped weapon DPS will contribute only ~40%, with attack power contributing the remaining ~60%.

I’ve been Feral since BC, and have seen a lot of changes come and go. With all the currently planned changes coming in WoD, I feel it’s time to voice some of my concerns to the community. There is a lot of talk about Haste, Snapshotting, and Savage Roar. I feel the one thing we need to look at is Ferocious Bite, which I feel is a major weak area in our rotation, and can be greatly improved upon.
Ferocious Bite currently doesn't providing a big enough reward when used correctly and when luck unexpectedly runs out can be a major issue when it’s used at the wrong time. Now I recognize there is skill involved with knowing when to FB or not, but even still, the small gain in weaving FBs is almost negligible in the grand scheme of things. With the changes to Combo Points, I can see multi target fights that we will forgo almost all FBs till 25%, and instead Rip everything we can.

What I propose is a change to FB, so that it has prominent role in our single target rotation. My thoughts are to allow for some kind of debuff on the target that rewards you in some way for attacking it after using FB.

Here’s my idea.

Panthera’s Insight
Ferocious Bite applies Panthera’s Insight, which converts the extra energy used by Ferocious Bite into a debuff on the target.
Each stack of Panthera’s Insight will return 1 energy back when Shred is used. Up to 5 stacks will be consumed per Shred.
If a target dies with Panthera’s Insight, up to 25 energy will be returned.
Panthera’s Insight can stack up to 100, and lasts for 1 minute.

I think this can solve a few problems.
1) Makes the single target rotation more interesting and more forgiving.
2) Makes dealing with short lived adds easier from the debuff and the energy return.
3) Could adjust the debuff to benefit from haste in some way if it’s needed. For example: Increase the amount of stacks consumed by Shred by a % of haste.

I think this could play off FBs unique energy conversion, since as far as I know it's the only ability that converts primary resources into something.

I hinted at this in an earlier post, but here's a thought for making the rotation more interesting without adding any new mechanics:

Increase the Tiger's Fury damage bonus to 30% (or so).

Benefits:
- Restores some of the snapshotting gameplay, but under a long-understood and non-random mechanic. (While 15% is still worth snapshotting, it's a very minor gain. This change aims to make it more rewarding.)
- More generally, this is "known burst damage window" gameplay akin to colossus smash, and in that vein, you'll also want to pool combo points for TF in order to land two finishers (either two rips or a rip and a ferocious bite). The necessity to also maintain savage roar could make this pretty nontrivial.
- Makes readiness more interesting for us. If it's just Tiger's Fury and Berserk, it's going to mostly just feel like haste, because those cooldowns are mostly energy regeneration. Making TF's other effect stronger will alleviate this.

Potential problems:
- Readiness breakpoints are harsher. But keep in mind that between the TF duration increase and the 30% "free refresh" period for periodic damage effects, those breakpoints will not be as big of a deal as they would be under current mechanics.
- Reaching the "TF every rip" readiness breakpoint significantly reduces the complexity this might add, at least in single-target scenarios.
- Risks leading to degenerate savage roar gameplay where it's optimal (or almost optimal) to always cast it once per TF cooldown (outside of TF, in order to ensure it doesn't need to be refreshed during or immediately before TF).

Stenhaldi wrote:I hinted at this in an earlier post, but here's a thought for making the rotation more interesting without adding any new mechanics:

Increase the Tiger's Fury damage bonus to 30% (or so).

Benefits:
- Restores some of the snapshotting gameplay, but under a long-understood and non-random mechanic. (While 15% is still worth snapshotting, it's a very minor gain. This change aims to make it more rewarding.)
- More generally, this is "known burst damage window" gameplay akin to colossus smash, and in that vein, you'll also want to pool combo points for TF in order to land two finishers (either two rips or a rip and a ferocious bite). The necessity to also maintain savage roar could make this pretty nontrivial.
- Makes readiness more interesting for us. If it's just Tiger's Fury and Berserk, it's going to mostly just feel like haste, because those cooldowns are mostly energy regeneration. Making TF's other effect stronger will alleviate this.

Potential problems:
- Readiness breakpoints are harsher. But keep in mind that between the TF duration increase and the 30% "free refresh" period for periodic damage effects, those breakpoints will not be as big of a deal as they would be under current mechanics.
- Reaching the "TF every rip" readiness breakpoint significantly reduces the complexity this might add, at least in single-target scenarios.
- Risks leading to degenerate savage roar gameplay where it's optimal (or almost optimal) to always cast it once per TF cooldown (outside of TF, in order to ensure it doesn't need to be refreshed during or immediately before TF).

This would also be a single target buff, but cleave nerf as it changes the balance between single target bleeds and multi-target bleeds. On a single target, with an 8 second TF we can keep a buffed Rake and rip up probably 70%+ of the time. On multi-targets that number will be much lower as the actual TF buff is only up <1/3 the time and you can only fit so many abilities into that 8 second window (upto 8 with berserk, probably about 4 without).

So I haven't played high end feral in well...ever. I was tree during my serious days. But I was thinking, what if ferocious bite had a proc that made it more attractive to use. Especially since the consolidation of mangle and shred has made the OoC proc less relevant to the rotation. So the specific idea is:

During Omen of Clarity your next ability (maybe changed to only finishers for feral abilities) costs no energy and consumes no combo points.

I think it helps add value to haste since white hits proc OoC and also improves the skill cap for higher end ferals. Also it, could be used to help recover from mistakes in the basic rotation by new players and possibly help reduce the feral barrier to entry. Just a an idea that could help out FB and vary the rotation in interesting ways without drastic changes to any abilities. And of course because arm chair game design is sort of fun.

Ogbar wrote:So I haven't played high end feral in well...ever. I was tree during my serious days. But I was thinking, what if ferocious bite had a proc that made it more attractive to use. Especially since the consolidation of mangle and shred has made the OoC proc less relevant to the rotation. So the specific idea is:

During Omen of Clarity your next ability (maybe changed to only finishers for feral abilities) costs no energy and consumes no combo points.

This sounds like a great tier bonus, but as an added normal ability, not so much. Would be too RNG heavy imo.

Ogbar wrote:Makes sense, I was thinking it was a ppm ability but it's just straight 6% on hit.

Haste still increases the chance b/c more hits/min = higher proc chance. The RNG comes in as to when it does proc in relation to how many cp's you have. How frustrating would it be proc OoC when you were at 2 cp's? If it was only finishers.....you would just be allowing a free FB for every proc which isn't all that exciting.

Maybe it would just be a FB press every time, though you might decide that it's worthwhile to refresh a short SR with the 2 combo points. It's also why I mention possibly only having OoC effect finishers, so you could bank it to 5 cp if you have time (though you risk losing a proc). Also, since combo points aren't on the target maybe you tab off drop a 2 cp rip on a cleave target and swap back.

But I get what you're saying at less than 5 combo points FB is too weak, so procs with fewer combo points vs. many combo points would have too much variance in damage. Just thinking we could use something to spice up the rotation going into WoD and a proc to use a certain ability free (instant being free for cast time classes) is fairly bread and butter across classes/specs.

zagtastic wrote:thoughts? or am i just flailing around impotently because i like this idea too much?

Much like Symbiosis this idea seems neat on paper, but would take a massive reworking to implement and balance, but would still end up not changing our rotation. Pretty much no matter what you mess around with, the combo point generation it would still be beneficial to use on cooldown. It would be really weird to have a mechanic to hold combo points for a proc we have no idea when it will come. It would totally be possible to never be able to use SR because trinket procs come when you use your combo points for Rip, and don't have time to get enough + energy to cast SR while the proc is still active. That just doesn't sound like a fun mechanic because it relies so much on lucky timing with procs and not really any skill.

What I am interested to understand is why is bleeds benefiting from Haste so exciting? In the new system the length of any hasted DOT won't change at all, it will just do more damage. Why go for very complex mechanics when "Rip/Rake hit harder" does the same thing? I know Haste has been boring for us for some time now. Even with Rune we only care cause Mastery will proc higher. I agree I would like to feel good about getting a piece of gear with Haste on it. I think it sucks that our Mastery doesn't really interact with our only cooldown (TF is rotational not a cooldown according to Celestalon). Like I said earlier in the thread feed back of what you don't like about the class now is much more helpful. Instead of coming up with a mechanic just say the problem you would like to see solved. That is feedback we can take to the designers that they can use.

Because I think faster energy regen would be better gameplay than double combo points. I would much prefer Haste was a better stat than Crit.

What I was asking was what would change about our rotation that would lead to said "better gameplay"? Allowing us to attack more often would required our damage to be lowered, and pretty soon we are GCD locked like a Ret. This is a total departure from what current game play is. Do you feel that being GCD locked is better gameplay then what we have now?

I guess it comes down to a scaling problem. I think Feral gameplay is good right now. Fix Ferocious Bite and it would be almost perfect. But I'm also about 120 item levels higher than I was in dungeon blues. So how can they make it less boring for the first 60%-70% of the expansion?

The issue I see is Blizzard makes these huge sea changes for the expansion and then it takes them the entire expansion to get it right. For this expansion they are making some massive changes that they can't tune and I think most of them are mistakes.

So if I understand what you are saying, it's not that you want better gameplay, you want it to be a bit less painful when we first start out? That makes sense. But bumping Haste won't lead to a solution, and won't improve gameplay.

What is broken about FB? Sure it doesn't hit that hard. But to make it hit harder would require bleeds to come down in damage to make up for that. In the end FB hitting harder will still not make you press it any more or any less. You still have to spend Combo points and energy on keeping Rip and SR up. So what about FB makes you want it to hit harder if our total damage remains the same?

teddabear wrote:The issue I see is Blizzard makes these huge sea changes for the expansion and then it takes them the entire expansion to get it right.

It was a little rough the first month or so, but once some tier gear showed up everything was fine rotation wise. We weren't even doing very bad dps wise (pretty middle of the pack). I don't know about you, but we saw hardly any changes at all this expansion. We had a bug fix for HT's GCD, an SR buff, and a Rip buff. Hell when SoO came out we lost NS. The biggest gameplay change came when you felt they got everything close to right.

teddabear wrote:For this expansion they are making some massive changes that they can't tune and I think most of them are mistakes.

We have hardly seen any changes at all so far. All we know is snapshotting is gone, and we have Pandemic now. With out further context of future changes (which I expect there to be plenty) how can you speculate that they can't balance it?

Yes as far as gameplay goes it would be better if Feral wasn't so energy starved in the beginning.

Ferocious Bite hits so weak and it is so rarely used that they could double its damage and they would only need to reduce Rip by 5-10%. Rip has gotten too long in my opinion as well. Since the Blizzard UI doesn't show how many times it has been extended shouldn't they get rid of that glyph? That's the same logic they used for removing snapshotting. It would also be wonderful if they could update our combo points on the client side instead of waiting for the server to tell us if we have crit or not.

I was mainly referring to the changes to secondary stats, reforging, enchanting, gems and sockets. I don't care for any of those and it's not something they can tune. We don't know much about the profession changes and garrisons but that causes some concern as well. I'm not quite sure how players are supposed to make money in WoD. I see tertiary stats causing a lot of loot drama and there was already enough of that already.

Feral felt like an incomplete spec after they removed Bear and now Blizzard is removing Symbiosis which is the only new ability we have gotten since longer than I can remember.

Enhanced Berserk is the worst possible buff they could have come up with for that ability, effectively a non-buff. The sad part is that is one ability that really needs reworking.
Agility users getting a flat +5% crit sounds problematic as well. I can see that as something that takes the entire expansion to tune.

I will say the Bear changes sound quite good but the Cat changes not so much.

Gads wrote:I’ve been Feral since BC, and have seen a lot of changes come and go. With all the currently planned changes coming in WoD, I feel it’s time to voice some of my concerns to the community. There is a lot of talk about Haste, Snapshotting, and Savage Roar. I feel the one thing we need to look at is Ferocious Bite, which I feel is a major weak area in our rotation, and can be greatly improved upon.
Ferocious Bite currently doesn't providing a big enough reward when used correctly and when luck unexpectedly runs out can be a major issue when it’s used at the wrong time. Now I recognize there is skill involved with knowing when to FB or not, but even still, the small gain in weaving FBs is almost negligible in the grand scheme of things. With the changes to Combo Points, I can see multi target fights that we will forgo almost all FBs till 25%, and instead Rip everything we can.

What I propose is a change to FB, so that it has prominent role in our single target rotation. My thoughts are to allow for some kind of debuff on the target that rewards you in some way for attacking it after using FB.

Here’s my idea.

Panthera’s Insight
Ferocious Bite applies Panthera’s Insight, which converts the extra energy used by Ferocious Bite into a debuff on the target.
Each stack of Panthera’s Insight will return 1 energy back when Shred is used. Up to 5 stacks will be consumed per Shred.
If a target dies with Panthera’s Insight, up to 25 energy will be returned.
Panthera’s Insight can stack up to 100, and lasts for 1 minute.

I think this can solve a few problems.
1) Makes the single target rotation more interesting and more forgiving.
2) Makes dealing with short lived adds easier from the debuff and the energy return.
3) Could adjust the debuff to benefit from haste in some way if it’s needed. For example: Increase the amount of stacks consumed by Shred by a % of haste.

I think this could play off FBs unique energy conversion, since as far as I know it's the only ability that converts primary resources into something.

Isn't this basically just a rehash of the mangle debuff now applied to FB instead? Personally I don't mind that FB is only truly valuable in execute range, in that sense it is not unlike a number of other class' abilities.
I'd still much rather see a change to SR away from the utterly boring and redundant way it works now.
Even so, I'd rather see the damage portion of DoC given to us as a lvl100 talent over a passive SR. I am really going to miss DoC... it's the most fun I've had playing as feral in a PVE environment. While Stenahldi's claims that you can play feral to the highest ability w/stock UI are a bit ridiculous**, it's not like forgoing it for HotW is a game killer. Feral still puts out competitive dps; and I expect it'd be the same with the "simpler" mooncat talent which it would seem -- as it stands now -- is basically just another dot in the rotation.
Speaking of which, I've been wondering if MF and these in-form Rejuvs would be affected by haste? They're technically spells, but things always get kinda wonky and complicated when it comes to feral. Overall, I don't mind that haste won't affect our bleeds. Haste breakpoints can be a pain to play with now when we have reforging -- it's a complication outside gameplay that I'd sooner forgo when reforging isn't available to us.
Assuming Readiness holds to the live concept behind AOC, I assume it won't affect talented dps cds... further devaluing Incarnation? NV and Treeants remain to be seen. But I think right now, unless we're going to start cheesing dps meters like the beginning of MoP... NV is the only real option in that tier. I'm just not interested in spamming wrath or hurricane as feral, nor in healing... the tank option could be interesting but I'm uncertain if casual raids would dabble in that kind of risk taking. NV is fairly decent as it stands now, I use it on Thok now as our 25man has 3 really good healers... and I'm satisfied with its performance. On the other hand, I won't miss having to time weapon swap + tranq w/devo aura from a Ret.

** You'd have to be rainman to track dancing steel, 2 trinkets, DoC charges, OOC procs and their icds while calculating and remembering the values of applied rip/rake/thrash compared to if-cast-now rip/rake/thrash. Addons are pretty much a necessity for that (Stenhaldi's own weakauras script in particular)
To say nothing of how ridiculous it is to stare at the top right of the screen just to track our normal buffs/debuffs (SR,rake,thrash,rip,weakened armor) and the bottom center/left to track our cds (TF,Berserk,FF,barkskin,SI,symbiosis)
This isn't particular issue to feral though, as I find the default UI to be pretty much unplayable for all but the most faceroll specs/classes.

musashibo wrote:While Stenahldi's claims that you can play feral to the highest ability w/stock UI are a bit ridiculous**,

Huh? I don't believe I've ever made that claim. Of the many deficiencies of the stock UI, I consider it unplayable for just about any class for the simple reason that the most important UI elements are all spread on opposite corners of the screen: cooldowns on bottom, resources on top left, buffs on top right.

musashibo wrote:
** You'd have to be rainman to track dancing steel, 2 trinkets, DoC charges, OOC procs and their icds while calculating and remembering the values of applied rip/rake/thrash compared to if-cast-now rip/rake/thrash. Addons are pretty much a necessity for that (Stenhaldi's own weakauras script in particular)
To say nothing of how ridiculous it is to stare at the top right of the screen just to track our normal buffs/debuffs (SR,rake,thrash,rip,weakened armor) and the bottom center/left to track our cds (TF,Berserk,FF,barkskin,SI,symbiosis)
This isn't particular issue to feral though, as I find the default UI to be pretty much unplayable for all but the most faceroll specs/classes.

all I have is debuff tracker rip/rake/SV (3 small icon) addon putted between standart UI elements and middle of screen where my view is concentrated during encounters, thats all, rest is done by your mind and fingers, after 4.2 those icons now come with numbers for snapshotting

no need anything else to play feral high rated at top, like all those crazy kinky addon lovers claims, oh you noob you play with blizzard ui, etc...all other stuff is PERSONAL preferences

I think that removes the strategy of when to use FB. Our whole system is based on spending energy and combo points at the right time. Just mashing FB at 5 combo points will result in a clunky rotation due to energy starvation. Holding energy until 50 or more to get the max out of it both feels better and makes things smoother to me. Don't forget you get a refund on the first 25 energy from SotF.

I will admit the timing of when the energy gets spent/refunded is odd looking at your energy bar (especially during Berserk or OOC).

Cetlysm wrote:what could they do with the "up to 25 extra energy consumed blablabla"
I can't be the only one that has never gotten used to it, it just feels and acts so clunky, makes me not want to use FB ever.

If its removed and the extra damage is added into the formula then PvP will cry, if the damage per energy is enhanced, it will still feel clunky as hell.

Do people still think its a bad idea to make FB into a small 3-tick(or any number, but fast and short) physical debuff or bleed?

I had thought of suggesting FB damage becomes a 2-3 sec DoT (ticking every second) for an unusual way to buff its damage but came to the conclusion that it would put Mastery even further ahead of where it is now. As it stands, having the extra 25 consumed makes it more interesting than "just another button to press".

I do find Bite works oddly with SotF though...especially if clearcasting is involved.Cost 25. Consume another 25. Refund 20. Net cost: 30 energy.
orCost 0. Consume 25. Refund 20. Net cost: 5 energy.
Feels wrong for our DD finisher to only have a net cost of 5.
The main "clunk" I find there is during Berserk+Bloodlust, if OoC procs chain themselves you can find yourself stuck at 90-100 energy. Then a clearcast procs just before you're due to Bite and, rather than having energy levels drop, you actually GAIN energy by the time the GCD has finished.
I know we're not alone in having a major cooldown that you want to de-sync from Bloodlust (or at least stagger Berserk by a second or two after TF) but it is something I would like to see changed...if only to not feel like I'm energy capping during cooldowns.

On another note, I saw someone's opinion somewhere (sorry, the exact location escapes me) of Multi-strike being functionally useless when compared to crit. Crit gives chance of higher damage and chance of bonus CP from Primal Fury (and LotP proc but that doesn't count for the purpose of DPS) where as Multi-strike only gives a chance of extra damage.
Based on that assumption, we're not going to be wanting two of the 5 Secondary stats now. Doing our best to stack Mastery, Crit and Readiness while ignoring Haste and Multi-strike. Do you feel this is how most specs will work (gravitating to 3/5) and do you feel this could cause problems if gear from one Tier ends up focusing on these two "weak" stats?

Noting that multistrike and crit currently have the same effective rating conversion (110 crit rating or 33 multistrike rating per 1%, effectively the same since a multistrike is only 30%), multistrike gains some value relative to crit simply because we have less of it: no base multistrike versus 17% base crit (including raid buff and boss level suppression).

Moreover, multistrike will be about as valuable to us as it will be for other classes. Most (non-tank) classes don't gain any extra effects from multistrikes, and those that do are typically given some base multistrike to compensate (frost armor and tiger strikes both granting multistrike chance).

Thus, while I wouldn't expect it to necessarily be our strongest stat, I also wouldn't worry about multistrike being a notably weak stat.